NVIDIA Contributes Some New Tegra/Nouveau Patches

It's not any re-clocking code or magical improvements for Nouveau's Pascal support, but on the Tegra side a NVIDIA developer has volleyed some new open-source patches.

NVIDIA developer Thierry Reding who since 2013 has been specializing in the Tegra improvements, sent out a couple patch series today targeting upstream DRM code. It's mostly memory management related with no "killer features" added, but notable nevertheless when NVIDIA makes an infrequent open-source code contribution.

Patch series out today include Nouveau changes for Tegra to use IOMMU groups, some DRM PRIME common code basic cleaning, Nouveau mmap() PRIME support so user-space can map buffers and access them using the CPU, and support for fence FDs. The fence file descriptor patches allow for explicit fencing support and synchronizing the display engine and GPU on Tegra hardware. Reding has also prepped libdrm and Mesa patches for Nouveau too.

Hopefully NVIDIA will have more promising open-source code contributions as the year moves on. It was also just before Christmas that other NVIDIA developers on the desktop side showed off their experimental allocator with Nouveau support as part of their Wayland / GBM-Alternative work on coming up with a new Unix device memory allocator library.